An ethical person - like a politician, banker or lawyer - may know right from wrong, but unlike many of them, a moral person lives it. An Americanist first already knows that.
Bankers and their government agents will always act in their own best interests. Any residual benefit flowing down to the citizens by happenstance will just be litter.

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Friday, March 27, 2015

New York Post Expose: Stock Market Rigging Hits the Mainstream

Stock
market rigging is no longer a 'conspiracy theory' ... The stock market
is rigged. When I started making that claim years ago — and provided
solid evidence — people scoffed. Some called it a conspiracy theory,
tinfoil hats and that sort of stuff. Most people just ignored me. But
that's not happening anymore. The dirty secret is out. – Justohn
Crudele/New York Post

Dominant Social Theme: The good times are back. Just look at the stock market.

Free- Market Analysis: The stock market has moved down hard these past few days and perhaps there is more to come. The moves allowed the New York Post's John Crudele to readdress a favorite topic of his, which is market-rigging in the US and abroad.

His most recent article seems to have made a
stir, puncturing a favorite elite market meme: The market is going up
because the economy is recovering.

Ed Yardeni, a
longtime Wall Street guru who isn't one of the clowns of the bunch, said
flat out last week that the market was being propped up. "These markets
are all rigged, and I don't say that critically. I just say that
factually," he asserted on CNBC.

Yardeni's claim is the most basic one: that the Federal Reserve won't do anything that will upset Wall Street and, in fact, is doing all it can to help the stock market.

But there are
other recent claims that come closer to the bull's-eye, even if the
archers don't quite see what they are hitting. The Wall Street Journal
carried an intriguing story on March 11 about how the Bank of Japan was
"aggressively purchasing stock funds." (The Journal is owned by News
Corp., the parent of The Post.)

"By directly
underpinning the market, [Bank of Japan] officials have tried to
encourage private investors to follow suit and put more money in stocks
in the hope of stimulating the economy and increasing inflation," read
the report with a Tokyo dateline.

The reasons given for the Bank of Japan's
interference, as we can see, are altruistic in some sense. Forcing
averages up is going to give the average Japanese investor a sense of
excitement that may encourage him or her to invest as well. The economy
will improve. Prosperity will expand.

Crudele uses the Japanese market rigging to
generate other speculations on how market manipulation works in the
biggest sense. It's his theory that the Bank of Japan and perhaps other
central banks around the world are dipping into US stock markets.

The idea is that the Fed might be reluctant
to take such actions for fear of discovery, but that other collegial
parties might be involved.

Perhaps this sounds far-fetched, but more
than a year ago, Crudele points out, it became known that the Chicago
exchange that trades options and commodities had created an incentive
program encouraging foreign banks, including central banks, to buy
discounted equity derivatives contracts.

Such contracts (think S&P futures) are
an easy way to move markets up and down – usually up. Crudele counsels
that market losses these days are usually followed by S&P futures
buying. "It almost always occurs," he writes.

US stock markets are not immune to direct
manipulation, however. Crudele claims that during 2008 when the entire
economy was unraveling at a rapid clip, phone logs he received show
regular contact between then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Wall
Street banks such as Goldman Sachs. The phone calls and stock market
rallies seem to have a relationship, he indicates.

Crudele points out that companies may be
able to force equities higher when they embark on stock buybacks that
take shares out of the market. However, there are other kinds of
possible manipulations that Crudele doesn't get into. Computerized
trading is one of them.

But the biggest manipulation of all is simply the endless stimulation that central banks have embarked upon.

Japan, the EU, the US and China are all
rapidly printing money despite various denials and equivocations. Is
this coincidence or a globally coordinated buying effort that may be
orchestrated by top bankers and the Bank for International Settlements
itself?

Our point for well over a year now is that
this latest Wall Street Party has been orchestrated via money printing
and regulatory adjustments that have had the effect of forcing averages
up.

We've been consistent, pointing out that
these manipulations provided investors with a significant window of
opportunity, provided they were properly hedged and practiced
appropriate asset allocation.

Is the current market downturn the end of
this manipulative effort – if that is what it is? Such time related
speculations are difficult to predict, indeed. But even a deep
retrenchment would not necessarily end this faux bull market.

Conclusion:

However,
when the market finally does move down definitively, we have a feeling
it will be a resounding crash. In the meantime, profits have been
gathered – and maybe, just maybe, there are more to come.